Housing Affordability

The latest home price figures confirmed what many of us already know: Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra markets are going gangbusters. But if the dream of homeownership seems to slip further away, savvy investors are looking for a bit of the square to get a foothold on the property ladder.

Angelique Donnellan reports.

Every morning Rob Cooper checks the housing market. The news is never good. “They’ve almost doubled price in the last five years or so, and just crazy.” Rob wants to buy a home so he can stop paying $800 a week in rent. “I love living in Woolloomooloo. It’s a great place—it’s so close to the city. I get to walk to walk through the Botanical Gardens in 20 minutes and it has all the, you know, the lifestyle drivers that I love.”

But he can’t afford to buy here.

So the IT Account Manager has joined the ranks of the generation dubbed the “rentvesters”. He’s bought a rental property in a market he can afford. “West Croydon’s the suburb location. It’s about 7k away from the city, and it was just under $700,000 for a three-bedroom house.”

Adelaide: it’s the city of churches. Population: 1.3 million. Median house price: $455,000.

BRYCE: Well, you can get terrific locations. You can buy period homes within 5ks from the Adelaide CBD that’s a beautiful period home on a 6 – 700 m2 land sold well under a million. If you did the same in Melbourne or Sydney—same position, same house, same land size—you’d be paying definitely double. In some cases, triple.

This one in Norwood, what I really like about it is it’s just a couple of ks out in the CBD.

Bryce Holdaway is a Buyer’s Agent based in Melbourne. About 18 months ago, he saw an opportunity in Adelaide for his clients: affordable houses with good rental returns.

Being in the early part of the growth cycle—where you can pick something up that seems ridiculously cheap by Melbourne and Sydney comparison—was really enticing. There’s no official data on how many homes are being snapped up by investors—but, according to realestate.com.au, there has been more than 1 million internet searches on South Australian properties from the Eastern States in the past 6 months alone.he number of searches from Victoria is up 70%.